After the Future

Douthat on Democracy

To be clear, the present Democratic Party is absolutely in favor of letting as many people vote as possible. There are no doubts about the mass franchise among liberals, no fears of voter fraud and fewer anxieties than on the right about the pernicious influence of low-information voters.

But when it comes to the work of government, the actual decisions that determine law and policy, liberalism is the heir to its own not exactly democratic tradition — the progressive vision of disinterested experts claiming large swaths of policymaking for their own and walling them off from the vagaries of public opinion, the whims of mere majorities.

This vision — what my colleague Nate Cohn recently called "undemocratic liberalism” — is a pervasive aspect of establishment politics not only in the United States but across the Western world. On question after controverted question, its answer to “Who votes?” is different from its answer to “Who decides?” In one case, the people; in the other, the credentialed experts, the high-level stakeholders and activist groups, the bureaucratic process. (Source)

Douthat is doing his job as the designated cultural conservative at the Times to 'splain conservatism to blinkered liberals. This column on first reading seems kind of silly because the technocratic state isn't a Liberal or Conservative thing; it's a capitalist-elite thing. Capitalist elites don't care about what ordinary people think--except when it's in their interests to manipulate them into believing that what's good for capitalist elites is good for ordinary people. 

When I was actively involved in education politics in Seattle a decade ago, the enemy wasn't Liberals because everybody is Liberal--it was corporate education reform, the kind of reform that wanted to impose its top-down, we-business-elites-know-best, Neoliberal ideology on local educational communities. Neoliberal programs like like Bush's 'No Child Left Behind' and Obama's 'Race to the Top' were equally bad because equally "elite" in their provenance, and equally oppressive in their top-down-ness.

The battle lines were between parents and teachers deciding what was best for their kids rather than the folks "downtown" or the bureaucrats in Olympia. Control ought to lie as close as possible to the people who are affected by decisions--and that should be the rule broken only in egregious situations.

If that means that local schools make minor, stupid decisions, that's a price worth paying. In the Virginia gubernatorial, Liberals should be smart enough not to take the culture-war bait. McAuliffe put his foot in his mouth when he made himself too easy to identify with the top-down, centralized education policy that all engaged parents--Liberals and Conservatives--hate. He should have simply pointed that out that critical race theory isn't taught in the public schools and then moved on. Let the locals remove the thing that doesn't exist.

And if the issue is whether to remove a book or two from the library, let the locals fight it out among themselves. If books are banned, they can easily be found elsewhere and will be all the more attractive to the kids who wound'n't have been motivated to read them otherwise.  

If the Republican Youngkin was running against the Democrat Arne Duncan (Obama's Education Secretary), I'd hold my nose and vote for Duncan because I think that Republicans need to be completely delegitimated until the Cheney/Kinziger wing of the party restores it to sanity. But I understand why so many people have come to despise Democrats of the Duncan ilk. They're what I call Aspen-Institute Democrats. Completely clueless in their Neoliberal arrogance. This is the kind of Liberalism that Anand Giridharadas skewers in Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World. They are Liberal in their cultural values, but just as invested in elite control of the system to protect their elite interests as Mitch McConnell. (See Note 1)

I wonder how many Liberal, urban, educated elites in the media and business who watched The Hunger Games and rooted for Katniss and the others from the outer districts realized that everybody in Main Street America sees them as the Capitol elite. The people on Main Street see more of the Stanley Tucci character in establishment Democrats than they see FDR. That's why the ridiculous child-molesting stories stick. And Liberal public intellectuals and policymakers should learn to let people alone in their local communities unless they are doing something that is an egregious abuse of minority rights there. They don't have to impose their prissy, being-right-about-everything on everyone every time.

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Note 1: See Molly Ball's 2017 "On Safari in Trump's America" where she accompanies squishily clueless Neoliberal Third Way Democrats trying to make sense of Trump's America. The naivete and smugness of this "type" of Liberal is something you came up against time and again in the Education Reform wars. There was always this pretense of listening without showing the least aptitude for hearing.  They just know better because they're rich and all the rich people they know thinks as they do. Their epistemological bubble isn't quite as thick as the one that enshrouds the cultural Right, but it's pretty thick. 

Jacobin Magazine on The Great Books

As early as 2003, a student editorialist for the Harvard Crimson complained that it was possible to graduate from that august institution without reading Aristotle or William Shakespeare. True, students bothered by this tend to be conservative little shits — but they are right to complain. More important than the decline of Harvard, however, is the need to address the structural barriers to great books for regular people, through free higher education, more equitable college preparation in K-12 schools, and a far less cutthroat economic system, in which survival is a human right and everyone has leisure time.  --Liza Featherstone

Exactly.

The 'little shits' comment is unfortunate, but you know who she's talking about: the Tucker Carlson and Ann Coulter wannabes who populate Young Republican chapters throughout our land.

And maybe there is some hope for young socialist intellectuals. 

BTW, I read Roosevelt Montas's Rescuing Socrates last month, and it's a refreshing defense of common sense about what a liberal arts education should be. 

 

The Hard Tyranny of Ridiculous Expectations

From Curmudgucation:

We've heard plenty about the "soft bigotry of low expectations." And Michael Gerson wasn't entirely wrong-- we have a history of all too often writing off students because of poverty or race or chaotic home life or not-so-brightness. Too often we really have held our most challenged students to no expectation at all.

But for the soft bigotry of low expectations, we have substituted the hard tyranny of ridiculous expectations. We have, for instance, substituted the expectation that every third grader will read at grade level no matter what. In some states (I'm looking at you, NY) we raised the standard for proficiency arbitrarily. And we have just generally pushed the idea that all students should be at grade level (as determined by anything from data averages to a politician's whim) all the time.

That seems like a swell expectation. It's not. It's stupid. Let's just apply that reasoning some more. Let's compute the average height for an eight-year-old and declare that all third graders must be that height. Let's require all children to be walking by their tenth month and potty trained by month thirteen. Let's require all seventeen-year-old males to be able to grow facial hair and all fifteen-year-old females to fill a B cup. And let's tell all young men and women that they must be engaged by age twenty-two.

Let's take every single human developmental milestone and set a point by which every human being must have achieved it. Because that is totally how human beings develop and learn and grow-- on exactly the same path, at exactly the same speed, at exactly the same time.

Ecraser la technocratie.

The Elite Center of Gravity in the Democratic Party

Michael Lind nails it this morning:

During the Progressive Era and the New Deal era that succeeded it, idealistic professional-class reformers were only one element of a coalition they were forced to share with the representatives of farmers and blue-collar workers — groups that made up a majority of the workforce in the mid-20th century. Take away the farmer-labor wing of the center-left, and you are left with upper-middle-class do-gooders like Woodrow Wilson and Eleanor Roosevelt. A progressivism based among college-educated professionals is going to be much more elitist, and perhaps much less egalitarian and effective, than one dominated by union leaders, urban bosses and agrarian politics. True, nonwhite and low-income Americans are important in the Democratic electorate — but they are grossly underrepresented in the organized center-left.

If there were a real progressive movement in the U.S., its attitude toward the professional class would be more skeptical than celebratory. In order to fund a decent-size welfare state, genuine progressives would demand higher taxes on Americans making more than $100,000 — or maybe more than $50,000 or even $30,000. Why not? Polls show that Americans are willing to pay somewhat higher taxes as long as they get better benefits like expansions of Social Security or Medicare. The pressure to exempt professional households that make between $100,000 and $250,000 a year is not coming from Middle America.

Genuine progressives would side with producers, of all kinds, against rentiers, of all kinds — including credential-rentiers like the members of professional monopoly guilds. If software can replace pricey lawyers, if moderately paid instructors can replace highly paid professors, if skilled nurses were allowed to do some of the things that only M.D.s now do at a fraction of the salary, the working-class majority would benefit immensely.

The proletarianization of the professional class should be welcomed and encouraged by the progressive movement. Already independent physicians are being replaced by doctors who are salaried employees of hospitals. Let prole lawyers work for legal services corporations and prole professors work for educational service companies. Unable to set their own incomes by means of guilds, many downwardly mobile professionals might belatedly discover the benefits of unions and legislation protecting workers against exploitation by managers and investors.

The bad news, then, is that the self-serving minority of credentialed professionals, rather than the majority of wage earners, is increasingly important in setting the agenda of the center-left. The good news is that the contradiction between progressive reform and the self-interest of the professional elite may come to an end as technology and economic reorganization eliminate the professions altogether.

This, in part, explains why Neoliberalism is embraced by so many Democrats. It is an ideology whose purpose is to sustain the interests of elites, and elites now define the center of gravity in the Democratic Party. Nothing changes until the center of gravity in the party shifts back to labor. 

I don't know if I can get up much enthusiasm for the proletarianization of anybody, but if that's what it takes to get a coherent, broad-based pushback against the way the top wealth percentiles have rigged the system in their favor, then so be it. Wage slavery is wage slavery whether your collar is blue or white.

What kind of society do I want? Might as well lay it out here in broad strokes.

In the long run, ownership of companies has to shift away from the rentier class to workers on the Mondragon model or other variations of it.

I support state ownership for a few enterprises that serve the common good, like healthcare, energy, and transportation.

There should always be room for innovative, small startups, and that requires capital, but there are ways of raising it and rewarding investors without their owning the company indefinitely. 

A few thoughts about the future of education and the professoriate:

I'm fine with the public-private mix in education. K-12 public schools should get state and federal funding, but should be governed locally.

Tenure as we know it should be abolished in post-secondary education, but there should be mechanisms in place to insure due process for faculty who are fired. But class distinctions between tenured and non-tenure faculty should be abolished. The criteria for accountability should be developed in faculty senates, and it should be possible for the faculty senate to overturn unjust firings.  

I don't know what's going to happen to the large state research universities regarding undergraduate education.They will not much longer be able to justify the large, impersonal lecture classes in the MOOC era. My guess is that they'll downscale and become heavily subsidized centers for graduate education for engineers, biotech, healthcare professionals, and other science/technical professions. 

While they are not going away any time soon, I think Law School and MBA programs are  credentialing scams. There are far less expensive and more practical ways to train lawyers and business people. Certificate programs in specialized areas make more sense, but a lot of that could be handled by MOOCs.

I would like to see a continued place for small, liberal arts colleges for undergraduates, but how that will work economically I don't know. Perhaps as an extension of the K-12 system. I suspect that the elite schools will survive because of their endowments and because there will always be an elite willing to pay the freight, but I wouldn't want anybody I care about to be just MOOC educated. Maybe people want to discuss that in comments. 

Neoliberalism and Public Education 3

This chart lays it out pretty well:

Neoliberalism and Public Education 2

It's interesting to me that whenever I do a post on public education, the pageviews go  down. My guess is that it seems like such a niche issue, and when people read me squawking about Charter Schools or the Common Core, they think that's my problem, but not theirs. But if anything I've been saying about Neoliberalism and its toxic effect on American society, then you need to understand how Neoliberal education reform is reshaping and reinforcing the dark, Social Darwinist angels of our nature. What's happening in our public schools right now is a perfect laboratory for understanding how Neoliberalism is reshaping American society in its image. 

Charter Schools are a perfect example. They seem innocent enough. I thought they were a great idea when I first heard about them. Why not give parents choices? Why not open up different possibilities for families? Why not fight the education bureaucracy? In theory nothing is wrong with that, and there may be a few school districts where charter schools actually perform that function. But it's not New Orleans, it's not New York, and apparently it's not Hoboken.

I'm glad Josh Eidelson at Salon is taking Neoliberal education reform on as part of his beat. The interview this morning can be very helpful in showing how Charters are a tool that seem innocent enough, but which create bigger problems than they were created to solve. The whole thing should be read, but this excerpt will give you a taste:

Supporters of charter schools have sometimes argued that offering a charter is a way to keep parents within the public school system who would otherwise just go to private school – or as some of the HoLa parents have suggested, leave the city entirely.

. . . I believe that the initial charter schools in Hoboken shook a lot of people up, and I personally had no problem with it. They have just reached a critical mass now, that they’re fostering white flight, and they’re bankrupting us …

The private school parents are great. They’re paying taxes, and they’re taking responsibility for themselves … But the fact is, when you want … local funds to subsidize what in some cases is essentially a private school, it just goes against, I think, the intent of public education.

When you say “essentially” in some [cases] is “a private school” – how so?

When you have massive fundraising drives where you can raise $100,000 … I wish the public school system had as much money to devote toward our children as at least one of the charter schools does …

They have tutoring … These parents are wonderful — they’re the best of the best. So in fact, I view them as a private school that puts [a] significant amount of their own money into it, while getting funds from the city …

They have the best of both worlds: They have some very, very active parents, involved parents, motivated parents …  And they have these incredible fundraisers. And they’re also able to get money from us …

Their demographic mix is certainly interesting, and their class – if I could use the word — classist mix, is certainly interesting.

How would you characterize that mix?

Some of the best and the brightest of Hoboken choose to send their kids there. And it’s a loss for us — both in terms of our demographic mix, and it’s frankly a loss in terms of the students …

They’ve created an alternative school system …

Exactly. In Seattle, we have alterantive or option schools within the public school system. There are ways to innovate and offer options to families that don't penalize those who stay in normal neighborhood schools. But the charter system creates ways for clever people to game the system, and for "winners" to take public dollars away from the "losers" to feather the already well-appointed nests. It only makes sense if you think that winners deserve everything they can manipulate the system to get, and that losers deserve to be losers. The intent of public education is to provide equity of educational opportunity to everybody. Charters undermine that intent whether intentionally or not. 

Neoliberalism and Public Education 1

I recently posted that the Democrats will be useless in supporting economic justice issues until being called a Neoliberal has the same stigma as being called a homophobe. Neoliberal ideology is just repackaged late 19th Century Social Darwinism, which is an ideological justification for social stratification that rewards winners and punishes losers, where the winners and their retainers compose the top economic quartile, and everybody else is a loser.

It's a system where the winners write the rules, and they write them in such a way to make sure that this pyramid stabilizes into a class system in which a small elite dominates, a somewhat larger retainer class benefits by enacting  and enforcing the elite will, and social mobility is granted to a few prodigies who come from the loser classes. There is nothing unusual about this. It's the way most societies have stratified into class and caste systems throughout history. It's just that as recently as forty or fifty years ago, the idea would have been shocking to most Americans that America could become that kind of society.

While this winner-take-all mentality is blatantly extolled among Republicans, it is abetted by Democratic elite policymakers as well, and nowhere is this more obvious than in the Obama administration's education policies. Even the name they give it--Race to the Top--is Social Darwinist.

While I realize that readers without kids in public schools see this as rather abstract and irrelevant to their concerns, it's a perfect example of the way the bipartisan elite opinion is captured by Neoliberal thinking, and if you are concerned as I am about saying No to Neoliberalism, then one place you can fight back is by learning about what's going on in your local public schools and supporting efforts of community activists there to push back against Neoliberal reform. It's one place where local efforts can make a difference in fighting a toxic national trend. We need to protect our local public schools from Neoliberal dismantlement.

If you would like to get some quick background on the issue, this interview this morning with Diane Ravitch is a good place to start, and my pieces here on Technocratic vs. Humanistic Public Education here and here is another--or just click on the education tag below.

I think that the hardest thing for concerned but uninformed people to deal with is the  spin given by Neoliberal reformers who make their efforts appear to be all about helping to overcome the achievement gap, to introduce reforms that provide innovation and choice, that hold teachers accountable, and that raise standards. Who could be against these things? And what kind of monster is Bill DeBlasio that he wants to close down a few charters in NYC? DeBlasio understands what's going on, but people of good will are confused because fellow Democrat Andrew Cuomo, a Neoliberal through and through, opposes him and stands with the pro-charter groups. Oh dear, Oh dear, the typical  liberal Democrat doesn't know what to think. DeBlasio has just gone too far.

But they were ok when Bloomberg closed down dozens of neighborhood schools, because they were loser schools. Charters are for winners. That's right, and they kick out any kid who looks like he's going to be a loser, when being a loser is measured by poor performance on standardized tests. Neoliberals don't care about losers; they want to redirect all resources to support winners, and charters are their tool of choice in the K-12 educational sphere.

I daresay there are  many advocates of Neoliberal education reform who sincerely believe their own propaganda. But charter schools, standardized testing, and teacher evaluations based on student performance are all tools being used to create a new system shaped on Neoliberal values, a system that is meant to privilege some and cast everyone else overboard. Ravitch does not use the term Neoliberal, but this is what's she's describing here:

And the move in Chicago, as well as elsewhere, to boycott standardized tests — where do you see that going?

The test that they’re boycotting — right now there’s just a couple different schools that are doing it — is a test that’s being phased out. So it doesn’t really have a lot of huge impact — and yet the Chicago public schools are reacting in a very punitive fashion.

In reading stories from the Chicago press, about how they keep sending out directives saying isolate the kids, tell the kids they have to sit and make an affirmative statement — it’s a hysterical response, about “oh my God, some child, somewhere, might not take a standardized test.” And you have to kind of step back and say, “When did Pearson and McGraw-Hill become the arbiters of privilege in American education?”

…It just goes on and on with the multibillion-dollar corporations determining who are the winners and who are the losers in American society. In effect, we have the standardized testing companies now as the arbiters of our meritocracy…

We’re doing to standardized testing what was done in “Brave New World.” And in “Brave New World,” the meritocracy was determined at conception. We use standardized tests as our means of sorting out kids, and saying “you’re at the top, and you’re at the bottom.” The problem with that is that suggests an end to social mobility. Because the one thing we know about standardized testing is that no matter what standardized test it is, those who have are at the top and those who have not are at the bottom…

There are a few kids who rise to the top despite all obstacles. And kids from really wealthy circumstances who fall to the bottom. But on the whole and consistently, the standardized test is a reflection of socioeconomic status. So in effect the standardized test then becomes a giving to those who have, and… certifying the have-nots as have-nots.

Neoliberals will protest that they are doing no such thing. But don't listen to what they say, watch what they do, and think for yourself. See how what's happening now leads to what Ravitch is talking about later. 

 

Technocratic v. Humanistic Education 3: Contra the Common Core

I am localist when it comes to education. I think parents and teachers know best what is in the interests of the particular children in their care. The main job of principals, superintendents, and legislatures is to support teachers and parents, not to prescribe for them in top-down paternalistic fashion what they think is in their best interests.

Regarding the Common Core Standards, many people might ask,"What’s wrong with setting standards"? Why should anybody think that's a bad thing? But what is the problem that needs to be solved here? Why are we spending these millions of dollars? Whose needs are being met? Is there a rampant national problem with teachers not knowing what their curriculum is? Do we have millions of parents across the land screaming for higher standards for their kids? No, most parent are fine with the education their kids are getting in American public schools, and American kids do fine on the International testing comparisons when you factor out poverty.

The problem narrative in the media is that our schools are failing, but this is simply not supported by the facts. Are many kids who go to schools in poor zip codes failing? Yes. But it’s not the schools that are failing them, but the larger society. Does anybody with an ounce of common sense think that raising standards is going to help failing poor kids to do better? Or is it rather going to reinforce for low achievers that they are not making the grade when they fail to meet these new "higher" standards and push them out of the system even earlier? Is the goal to get kids to perform at a standard level, or to help them to take the next steps that are right for them to improve their lives? Who knows what those steps are? Some bureaucrat in D.C. or Olympia, or the kid’s teachers and parents? Is the goal to work with kids to have them set their own goals for the life they want to lead, or to have their goals set for them by some cookie-cutter template designed in Washington or by the Gates Foundation?

Second, what’s driving this recent push for the common core? The same thing that has been driving education policy since at least 2000--so-called Education reform. What is driving education reform?  A Neoliberal mindset that dominates policy elites in both parties and that thinks markets solve everything, that almost everything public should be privatized, that unions are the enemy, that the democratic process is an impediment that prevents technocrats from doing what they know is best.

And so the common core cannot be evaluated outside of this larger historical political context that has defined education policy for the last decade and more. It’s focus is largely to blame teachers and unions for the poor achievement of kids especially in poor zip codes.

The bad teacher narrative is a false one. The "Bad Teacher" is the same kind of stereotype as the "Welfare Queen", and it serves the same rhetorical purpose, which is to undermine the legitimacy of the vast majority of the people who compose the group who bear no resemblance whatsoever to the negative stereotype. Are there bad teachers? Yes, just as there are some people who abuse the welfare system. But the vast majority of teachers and welfare recipients are not “bad”, and in the same way that you shouldn’t design a welfare system assuming that most recipients will be abusers, you don’t design and education system assuming that most teachers are incompetent. You deal with abusers and incompetents on a case-by-case basis.

So what does the common core have to do with this anti-teacher campaign? Well, what’s the point of having a common core if there aren’t going to be tests that assess whether kids are making the grade at the new standard? And are tests within the Neoliberal frame really about assessing the kids, or are they about assessing the teachers and linking their effectiveness as teachers to the performance of their students on high-stakes tests? Can't you see how this Neoliberal reform mindset, whether they are conscious of it or not, assumes that kids are widgets and that teachers are assembly line workers who have to produce students that pass quality control before they can be let out onto the job market? Isn’t that really the goal of Neoliberal reform—not to produce rounded, educated human beings but good workers? Career readiness is the mantra continuously repeated by the reformers; it’s all about how these kids are going to make a living, and much less about how they will make a life.

Sue Peters' and Dora Taylor's Seattle Education blog makes the point emphatically:

The same heavy-handed, top-down policies that forced adoption of the standards require use of the Common Core tests to evaluate educators. This inaccurate and unreliable practice will distort the assessments before they’re even in place and make Common Core implementation part of the assault on the teaching profession instead of a renewal of it. The costs of the tests, which have multiple pieces throughout the year plus the computer platforms needed to administer and score them, will be enormous and will come at the expense of more important things. The plunging scores will be used as an excuse to close more public schools and open more privatized charters and voucher schools, especially in poor communities of color. If, as proposed, the Common Core’s “college and career ready” performance level becomes the standard for high school graduation, it will push more kids out of high school than it will prepare for college.

This is not just cynical speculation. It is a reasonable projection based on the history of the NCLB decade, the dismantling of public education in the nation’s urban centers, and the appalling growth of the inequality and concentrated poverty that remains the central problem in public education.

Education reform is just another Neoliberal con. It's all about marketizing education on every level possible. There's lots of money to be made here, and it's just a new gimmick for the corporate education industry to suckle at the government teat. 

See also Humanistic v. Technocratic Education 2.

Technocratic v. Humanistic Education 2

I wrote on this theme here, but this kid really gets it:

See also Patrick Denneen's eloquent speech at Notre Dame against the Common Core. Key grafs:

I began by suggesting that it was in the very absence of any national standard for education, and the strong tradition of local control of education, that we could perceive, in fact, a pervasive historical commitment to the aspiration of republican self-government. Because humans in their social and political communities are various, it was understood by our Founders that the way that these educational purposes to be achieved would be various, and so the commitment to local control of education was not born of a resignation in the absence of a strong central government, but a positive embrace of variety and multiplicity. Because there is likely to be debate and disagreement in a pluralistic society over the nature of our civic ends and the nature of a good character, it was understood that only in more local circumstances could the highest aspirations of education be pursued, even if that would be various and multiple. In our modern insistence to standardize and equalize, we necessarily discard any higher aspiration of education’s end in an embrace of a widely-secured agreement about lower, debased ends: an education based upon a lowest common-denominator, “career-readiness.” Our civilization thus shows its ultimate commitments through how it educates its young—that we think them incapable of anything higher than being workers in a deracinated globalized economic system, neither citizens nor, in the fullest sense, humans.

At the same time, we condemn ourselves, betraying our ancient faith in our own ability to educate and cultivate our young, handing over our final and most basic liberty to a distant power. Contained in the very act of handing over the education of our young is the self-indictment of a decaying Republic, a future feared by, among others, Tocqueville, as a possible path that America might take, since it is one that all republics heretofore have taken, and is an inevitability once a people has lost the taste and the art of ruling themselves.

 

Erase to the Top

Here are some posts I put up when this cheating scandal in Atlanta first broke in 2011. See here, here and here. 

The emphasis on test scores is all about the technocratic compulsion to measure one kid againsst another, one teacher against another, one school against another--to what end? Does anyone with good sense think that this demand that everhyone measure up to some bureuacrats's standard is somehow going to significantly improve learning? 

Assessments are part of learning. No one is questioning that. But anybody who knows anything about how learning happens understands that bubble tests give the most superficial kind of assessment. They have some superficial value, but they don't tell you the important things that other assessments and a teacher's just knowing his or her kids can tell you. 

This compulsion toward standardized testing is complex, but it abets the idea that most teachers are incomptent, and that we need some objective standard to assess teachers and to hold them accountable. But as I've argued before, if you want to improve educational outcomes, train teachers well, pay them a decent wage, and trust them to do their jobs. Everything follows from that. 

School Choice is Not a Solution

The Milwaukee voucher schools have never outperformed the public schools on state tests: See here and here. The only dispute about test scores is whether voucher students are doing the same or worse than their peers in public schools.

Accountability? Read here about some very low-performing schools in Milwaukee that have never been held accountable. One of them opened in 2001. Over the past 11 years, it has collected $46.8 million but its students perform worse than those in the public schools. Some choice.

And anyone who looks at the NAEP reports on urban districts will see that after 22 years of vouchers, charters, and competition, Milwaukee is a poster child for the failure of vouchers, charters, and competition. The students in those schools all perform about the same level. No sector is better. The Milwaukee schools are ranked among the lowest performing of the urban districts tested by NAEP, ranking just above sad Detroit.

If choice was the answer, Milwaukee should be at the top of the nation’s urban districts. But it is near the bottom. Why? Because choice is not the answer. Addressing the causes of low test scores is the answer, and choice does not address the causes of low test scores: poverty and segregation (Diane Ravitch)

See also the CREDO report from Stanford on how most charters underperform public schools.

Anybody who has been paying attention to what's been going on in neoliberal education reform understands that the big push to promote charters and vouchers has little to do with improving poor kids' academic outcomes and much more to do with pushing a privatizing ideology that in the minds of its proponents is medicine for all that ails us. And as I pointed out the other day, standardization tools like the common core have less to do with raising standards and more to do with providing a justification for closing public schools and privatizing them. This can be done because so many people buy the propaganda that our schools are failing rather than understanding that our society is failing the kids who go to those schools, and that there is little the schools can do that can make a real difference.

Where you go to school doesn't matter so much as where you grow up. Schools of any kind--public, private, or charter--cannot offer broad scalable solutions until you deal with the underlying causes and constraints of child poverty. Sure, some schools perform better than others, but there are no formulas. Success has to do with particular people finding something that works in their particular community. I think that particular communities, in an interdependent relationship with the broader educational community, should be given latitude do develop their own solutions.

I'm all for innovation and creativity. But charters don't offer that any more than normal public schools do, because both are constrained by the need to teach to the test. And so too many of these charters are standardized testing mills, and they are delivering exactly the opposite of what these kids need. All kids need to be challenged, but the challenges are different for different kids, and standardization doesn't promote choice; it puts all kids, whether they are in public or charter schools, in a one-size-fits-all straitjacket. 

***

I'm not anti-market; it clearly has its uses, but there's a difference between having a market economy and a market society. In the latter everything becomes a commodity, and there are some things that cannot be commodified.

I'm planning to do a piece, or maybe a series of pieces, on the origins of neoliberalism, and I'm want to frame it as a philosophical debate between Friedrich Hayek and Michael Polanyi. I'm clearly in the Polanyi camp, but I want to give a fair representation to the concerns of people who are persuaded by Hayek. There is a serious debate at the bottom of all this, and it's essentially a debate about human empowerment and the conditions that promote or undermine it.

The Common Core State Standards

I remember when I first heard about the movement to develop a national common core for K-12 public school curricula, I thought, "Why not?"  Why not set standards that will give a high school diploma some meaning? Why not set up a national curriculum that insures that every kid has a solid grounding in history, arts, math, and the sciences?  Since then I've learned a lot about what's really going on, and my opinion about it has reversed.

First of all it's way too top down, one-size-fits-all. Although there are some situations where centralization is desirable and necessary, this is not one of them. A centralized core is too easily coopted by powerful players, and the more you learn about the Common Core State Standards, the clearer it becomes that it is a child of neoliberal establishment elites foisting its ideas about reform on public education.

Reform for neoliberal education reformers is akin to what reform means for the IMF when it seeks to impose the bipartisan neoliberal program known as the Washington Consensus on countries that are in debt crisis. There is a 'Washington Consensus" concerning education as well. We see it in the neoliberal reforms promoted by No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. Neoliberal education reformers want you to believe that our public schools are in an analogous crisis--the educational equivalent of Argentina in the eighties or Greece now--so they need drastic intervention to reform the schools on neoliberal principles.  But as I said in a post earlier this month, our schools are not the problem, poverty is. And while schools have a role to play in any efforts our society makes to deliver children out of it, any strategy that believes that schools should carry the full burden of that effort is doomed to failure.

The Common Core is not going to solve this problem, not even a little. Here's Diane Ravitch on this subject:

The most reliable predictor of test scores is family income.

The Common Core will have no impact whatever in changing the scandalous proportion of children who live in poverty in this nation. Nearly a quarter of our children are living in poverty, as compared to far smaller proportions in other societies. If we were to make a dent on that number, bring it down to, say, 15%, that would have a bigger impact on test scores than Common Core. But that is just my guess.

The common wisdom, repeatedly predicted by state superintendents, is that test scores will drop by 30% or so when the Common Core standards are assessed because the tests are “harder.” This will feed the corporate reform narrative that “our schools are failing.” They will use the new stats to attack public education and demand more vouchers and more charters and more privatization. The entrepreneurs are eagerly awaiting the moment when the bad scores are announced, as it will give them new opportunities to sell their edu-schlock.

The fact that David Coleman, the architect of the Common Core standards, was an original member of the board of Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst–the corporate reformers’ attack machine against public education–is no comfort. The other members of her original board were Jason Zemba, who wrote the Common Core math standards, and a third person, who worked for Coleman’s Student Achievement Partners. In other words, Rhee’s board was the same as the Common Core leadership.

Do you see how this game is played? There are so many different tactics that are being deployed in the neoliberal education reform agenda, and any one of them--charter schools and vouchers, common core, teacher accountability, Teach for America--when taken in isolation seem innocuous enough, but taken together are designed to destroy a system that whatever its flaws should be community controlled, not corporate controlled. 

For more on this read how principal Carol Burris's opinion changed too. She even co-authored a book promoting the idea of the common core, but she says the well has been poisoned. See here and here. Interesting grafs: 

The best way that I can explain my trepidation is with the following analogy.

Hurricane Sandy hit the shores of New York and New Jersey at high tide when there was a full moon, a time when tides were 20% higher. It was a Category One hurricane of no great fury—its winds were “only” about 74 miles per hour.  However, Sandy became a super storm due to a Canadian cold front, which wrapped around the hurricane, making the storm larger and more ferocious.

Think of the Common Core standards as the high tide—the tide intended to lift all boats. Testing is the hurricane—a strong storm that blows through each year and affects our every action as educators.  Now add the cold front, the ever-increasing high stakes, wrapping around the tests. Those high stakes—school closings, grade level retentions, and the evaluation of teachers by student scores—have given the hurricane additional fury and strength.  High tide, which in and of itself is benign, now becomes a destructive force.

As a New Yorker who saw the tide of a nearby bay fill four feet of our home, I have new respect for what occurs when strong forces converge. 

Neoliberal reforms are the factors that make something that seems benign into something terribly destructive. 

America's "Education Crisis"

 Linda Darling Hammond in a recent interview:

Well, there are a couple of things to know before we talk about the scores. First of all, the United States has more children living in poverty, by a long shot, than any other industrialized nation. Right now about one in four children are living in poverty. In most other industrialized nations we’re talking about well under 10 percent, because there’s so many more supports for housing, healthcare, employment, and so on.

With that very high poverty rate, our average scores on international tests look a little above the average in reading, about at the average in science and somewhat below the average in math, and a lot has been made out of that in the United States. But in fact, students in American schools where fewer than 10 percent of the students live in poverty actually are number one in the world in reading. Students in schools with up to 25 percent of kids living in poverty would rank number three in the world in reading, and even schools with as many as 50 percent of kids in poverty scored well above the averages in the OECD nations – which is mostly the European and some Asian nations. Our teachers are doing something very right in terms of educating kids to high levels in much more challenging circumstances than children face in other countries.

The place where we really see the negative affects are in the growing number of schools with concentrated poverty, where more than 75 percent of children are poor. And there -- the children in those schools score at levels that are near those of developing countries, with all the challenges that they face.

When I was running for school board in 2011, everybody was talking about the "achievement gap" and the pervasive narrative then was to blame teachers and schools for it, to bemoan the cataclysm besetting American public schools and how despite the money we spend our rankings are so low in international testing. And when I pointed out that poverty was to blame and not teachers and schools, I was told my attitude was rooted in "the soft bigotry of low expectations", that the real reason was that teachers looked at poor kids and didn't have the high expectations that they had for more affluent kids, that education was the way out of poverty, and that the solution was to have an excellent teacher in every classroom. A good propagandist knows how to take a partial truth that resonates with uncritically accepted popular assumptions and to make it the whole story.

I guess we've been told for so long now that education is the way out of poverty that a lot of Americans have bought this story as applicable for all children everywhere. I'm not going to deconstruct it here--it's too tedious and obvious. But it became a commonplace, and still is, that the schools are the problem, and newspaper editorialists across the nation for the last decade and more have ardently supported the "reformers"--the Michelle Rhees, Wendy Kopps, Arne Duncans, Joel Kleins, Bill Gateses, Eli Broads, etc. who have been behind this idea of closing failing schools and replacing them with charters, of blaming teachers and insisting on tying their evaluations to student progress, and of promoting high-stakes standardized testing as a way of improving academic standards.

None of these wants to look at the root cause, which is poverty. All of them are promoting ideas that are driving the good teachers out of teaching because they don't understand the intrinsic motivations that drive all good teachers. They don't understand how they are making things worse--or if they do, they don't care because they have other fish to fry.

And so the idea that our schools are failing is a commonplace, especially among the rich liberal democrats who fund the politicians who make education policy --the kind who hang out at the Aspen Institute Ideas Festival. Some them are naively sincere. Others clearly are opportunists. As David Sirota pointed out the other day:

You know how it goes: The pervasive media mythology tells us that the fight over the schoolhouse is supposedly a battle between greedy self-interested teachers who don’t care about children and benevolent billionaire “reformers” whose political activism is solely focused on the welfare of kids. Epitomizing the media narrative, the Wall Street Journal casts the latter in sanitized terms, reimagining the billionaires as philanthropic altruists “pushing for big changes they say will improve public schools.”

The first reason to scoff at this mythology should be obvious: It simply strains credulity to insist that pedagogues who get paid middling wages but nonetheless devote their lives to educating kids care less about those kids than do the Wall Street hedge funders and billionaire CEOs who finance the so-called reform movement. Indeed, to state that pervasive assumption out loud is to reveal how utterly idiotic it really is, and yet it is baked into almost all of today’s coverage of education politics. 

It's amazing to me how so many people don't want to look at the hard truth that poverty is at the heart of things, that the burden of solving all the problems associated with learning and poverty are too heavy for schools and their teachers to shoulder alone. It's amazing to me that the corporate reformers' technocratic cluelessness, their obsession with quantifying and measuring what cannot be measured is so influential. But it is, because like so much of what influences policy in our country right now, it's about money, who has it and who doesn't.

P.S. Good piece in the New Yorker about the teachers at Seattle's Garfield High School who are boycotting the use of the standardized MAP test. The MAP was also something I ran against back in 2011. Its use both subtantively and symbolically points to everything that is wrong with corporate reform ideas about closing achievement gaps.

Why Groupthink Works

In politics (and social life) what one person thinks doesn't matter as much as what the group thinks. If you understand the thinking of the group, you almost always understand the thinking of the individual. The higher the stakes, the more intense the groupthink. The more ambiguous the issue, the greater the individual's reliance on the group.

The individual who goes against the groupthink, unless he or she is someone with enormous social capital or credibility within the group, finds himself marginalized and stripped of credibility. Virtue in most groups is not defined by independent thinking, but by the degreee to which one is capable of articulating the group's mind and reinforcing what it already thinks. There are exceptions, but they are few. People who don't like living in social worlds dominated by this kind of groupthink have opted out and keep to themselves. That's been my inclination until recently.

Everybody is influenced by groupthink. It's not the special preserve of conservatives, although in its extreme form theirs has a rather noxious tribal and the world-is-against us character. But Liberal political correctness is the other extreme, and it's equally noxious. But this post is not primarily about condemning groupthink--that would be like condemning language; groupthink is foundational in making it possible for us to communicate at all. It's about trying to try to understand how it works, and how to change it when it has gone off the tracks. 

So how does the group mind get formed? That's a big question for another day. We'd have to get into acculturation and the sociology of knowledge, and so much more. I'd rather start with the empirical before getting into the theoretical and begin with some observations from my involvement in local politics. I've learned that it's especially the people who are most involved with issues, who are most aware of the technical complications, of the devil in the details, so to say, that seem to be most constrained by groupthink.

I'm not judging that, just observing that it seems to be mostly true. People who have been part of an "issues conversation" for a long time, tend to lose perspective and are in a position where it's difficult for them to judge whether the conversation got off the tracks at some point. Any outsider who thinks it has got off the tracks and points that out might be politiely listend to, but easily dismissed because he hasn't been a part of the conversation; he doesn't understand all the complications and ins and outs. And that's true. But even when the emperor has no clothes, there will be those who insist that he looks just fine, exactly how he is expected to look. You can't just make that history go away, no matter how wrong or silly it has become. To the people involved, it is not silly, and they are invested in it. 

But it's also why bad decisions are made. The conversation went off the tracks somewhere during that conversation's history, and there was no one who noticed, or if someone noticed, he hadn't the credibility to persuade others in the group to get the conversation back on the tracks. The bigger bad decisions are not made at one point in time in a vacuum. They are the result of faulty assumptions and cumulative, small, unnoticeable bad decisions made over time, but are legitimated and reinforced by the groupthink. There are always good reasons to do the wrong thing; any one position on an issue is rarely unambiguously right or wrong, but  once a bad decision is made, the insiders who made it have a huge investment in justifying and defending its rightness. Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan come to mind.  

And so the insider understandably comes to perceive dissenters as clueless outsiders who don't share in their history, high ideals, and superior grasp of the situation. When attacked, they unite in common defense. Outsiders, by definition, have not been part of the insider conversation, and so can't know what they know. A perfect case study for this kind of groupthink can be seen in the way the Gates Foundation and the coterie of elites from Arne Duncan down to the local city and state politicos in both parties have shaped fundamentally bad ideas around K-12 education policy.

Yes, there are some bad actors who have been involved in shaping that conversation, but they made arguments that smart, well-intentioned people bought into. And once money and power are behind a particular policy, its groupthink becomes enormously potent no matter how stupid. Everybody lines up behind it because so many careers depend on group members' suppressing whatever doubts they might have. There are always good reasons to do the wrong thing, and it's easy to justify keeping one's doubts to oneself when people a lot more powerful than you in the group will disagree with you and slam you.

The grass-roots opposition to such policies has little chance against it because it attracts eccentrics with no money and no real ability to organize and to speak with a unified voice. They are easy for "insiders" to dismiss and to outmaneuver. Nothing essential is at stake for most people in the opposition--like a career--it's the issue alone that motivates them, and while it would be unfair to call their involvement a hobby, it's not their job. It's not what puts food on the table, and so they are always at a disadvantage when fighting people for whom the fight is their job and for whom the stakes are much higher as a result. The degree of commitment varies from these "hobbyists", and except for a few, you can count on them to bloviate anonymously on the blogs, but not to show up at a fundraiser or organizing meeting. The hobbyists are always going to lose against the lobbyists. The lobbyists are always in the stronger position to maneuver and frame the issues on terms favorable to themselves; it's their job. 

I'm talking about myself here as a hobbyist well as anybody else. I show up for some things but not for others. I have no special virtue in this respect. And I have tremendous respect for the people who do always show up, but they are a ridiculously small number. And some of them are motivated by anger and other things that make them easy to dismiss if you are in the power structure.

And unfortunately the sane people are lumped together with those who are less than sane in the same category: "community acitivists", people who are dismissed by policymakers as a hodgepodge who have their axes to grind, who don't see the big picture, and who don't have the responsibility to live with the decisions they make. Their jobs and careers are not on the line. If I'm a policymaker, who am I going to listen to--some community activist whose ideas might have some validity, but don't fit into the "conversation", or to the elites who have been shaping the conversation? 

It's become clear to me that realistically the only way to get things done is to work in the power structure, because in this country the only way things get done is when a consensus develops among the elites who dominate it. While a lot, maybe most, elites are lost causes, there are some who want to do the right thing, but they have only other elites to listen to--there really is only one conversation going on--and so their own better instincts are usually suppressed.  

And so the question for me is whether to submit myself to that.To accept the "elite" conversation where it is now on its own terms. To become, in other words, part of a conversation that I think is at its roots based on false assumptions. To sit at endlessly tedious meetings where people, mostly other people, are talking about things that seem formulaic at best and idiotic at worst. To pretend to be respectful so that I can in the short run build my credibility so that in the long run I'll be able to say something that might be heard by someone who has the power to do something about it.

Because nothing can be heard, no matter how much sense it makes, unless it's presented in the groupthink vocabulary that has a history and has the investment of the people who have developed it, and one has to learn that history and that vocabulary, no matter how suffocating if one expects to be taken seriously by the people who make things happen. 

Maybe that's just what has to be done. But five years from now will I have become one of them by some process akin to Stockholm Syndrome? That's what seems to happen more often than not. Becoming part of the conversation, is just another word for being coopted. So what is one to do?

 

 

 

 

Technocratic v. Humanistic Education 1

The growing rush and the disappearance of contemplation and simplicity from modern life [are] the symptoms of a complete uprooting of culture. The waters of religion retreat and leave behind pools and bogs. The sciences . . . atomize old beliefs. The civilized classes and nations are swept away by the grand rush for contemptible wealth. Never was the world worldlier, never was it emptier of love and goodness. . . . Everything, modern art and science included, prepares us for the coming barbarism. . . .Everything on earth will be decided by the crudest and most evil powers, by the selfishness of grasping men and military dictators.  --Friederich Nietzsche, Thoughts out of Season, 1873-76

***

[W]hat is at issue here is evaluating the danger of what might happen to our humanity in the present half-century, and distinguishing between what we want to keep and what we are ready to lose, between what we can welcome as legitimate human development and what we should reject with our last ounce of strength as dehumanization. I cannot think that choices of this kind are unimportant. --Jacques Ellul

I have come to look at schools as a critical focal point in the fight for the soul of the nation, because schools are so foundational for our cultural life, and so much depends on our having a flourishing, humanizing public-education system. The battle over the schools is a microcosm of the battle that is going on everywhere else, but which most people feel too powerless to fight.

But most people understand that it's not good for their kids to have their schools run like the big corporation or governmental agency they or their neighbors work for. They understand that it's not good for their kids to have their schools turned into testing mills with a narrowly focused curriculum. And they realize that it is critical for them to organize to fight off the aggressive, well-funded efforts by national corporate-reformers to privatize their schools and turn them into just that. Because no sane parents want that for their kids, it's possible to channel their energy into resistance to the technocratic machine that otherwise dominates their lives. 

If public school education is a critical battleground for the soul of the nation, who are the combatants? I see them as broadly falling into two camps: technocrats and humanists. Let's define terms. I mean 'humanist' in the broad sense as the affirmation of the value and dignity of particular, individual human beings and of their individual potential to become more densely realized as a Selves in community with other Selves. This contrasts with the technocratic tendency to see humans as abstractions in the aggregate, as data points on a spread sheet.

I also mean 'humanism' in its more common sense as the study of the humanities, that is, the study of the human condition--history, languages, literature, philosophy, religion, the arts--and the free-ranging quest for knowledge through the sciences. I mean it in the classical, renaissance sense, in which humanist thinkers revolted against the utilitarian, dead, mechanistic scholasticism that had rigidified learning in the universities in the late 14th and early 15th centuries. Renaissance humanism was whole-brained in the McGilchrist sense, and it laid the foundation for a remarkably spirited efflorescence in literature, the visual arts, architecture, science, and scholarship that we now associate with the quattrocento in Italy, and later in the low countries and England. 

The European renaissance was one of those moments in which the whole human being--as embodied, ensouled, and spirited was celebrated. Leonardo's and Michelangelo's genius would not have been realized had this underlying rich, deep understanding of the human and of human possibilities not been the soil from which they drew nourishment for their development.

Our culture no longer produces such great souls--at least none that are widely recognized. It produces plenty of smart people but few, if any, who could be called "big souled". Can you name one person born in the developed world since World War I who 500 years from now will be ranked at the same level of greatness with Leonardo, Michelangelo, Goethe, Bach, Beethoven, Lincoln, Tolstoy, Dostoyevski, to name just the ones that come quickly to mind? The only two I can think of who come close are Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King, and neither represents a typical 20th-Century, developed-world upbringing. And one we killed, and the other we threw into prison for twenty-seven years. What then are the conditions that allow for the emergence such human beings? What is it about our culture now that seems to impede their emergence? What is wrong with us?

This Renaissance lasted for about 150 years, drying up around the time of Descartes and the subsequent obsession with a constrained, rationalistic need for certainty. Romanticism and German Idealism revived something of the renaissance spirit, but it was quickly quashed after the mid-19th century, as an antihumanist, soul-crushing, reductionistic materialism came to dominate Western societies. The collective meaning framework of the West was shattered, and with that followed in the 20th century the loss of a broad cultural sense of purpose or of higher aspiration. (See Nietzsche quote above.) 

That is now our condition as diffident, no-longer-moderns. There was the Age of Faith, then the Age of Reason, and now we have devolved into the Age of Whatever, and the vacuum created where there was once a soul is now filled with the craving to consume. And so everywhere the forces for the soulful 'human' are in retreat. A basic human decency still pervades the culture, but there is no greatness anymore, no big souls, only the parody of greatness in celbrityhood or in corporate buccaneering. That's what's wrong with us.

***

So then, what of technocracy and why is it a problem that should concern us? What are the characteristics of the technocratic mindset that pose such a serious threat to the soulful human? The technocratic mindset feels at home in governmental, corporate, and foundation bureaucracies. It is procedure oriented and lacks practical wisdom or adaptability to the unforseen or the uncontrolable. 

Large organizations are hierarchical, and they attract ambitious people who seek to climb to the top. It recruits the best and brightest, but filters out anyone who would challenge its narrowly defined assumptions. The people who succeed in rising into positions of leadership are Hi-IQ, very articulate, and have been promoted precisely because of their aggressiveness and confidence in promoting the technocracy's mission. Their success within the paramaters defined by the technocracy's mission has reinforced their self-perception as the best and the brightest, and this breeds in them a we-know-better arrogance, and so they are too often contemptuous at worst, patronizing at best, of anyone who disagrees with them, especially if they are "soft" humanistic types.

Technocracies as systems are very uncomfortable with what they cannot control or predict. They therefore see the lively, eccentric, and unpredictable as irrelevant or as a problem to be eliminated. It revels in the general, and is allergic to the concrete and particular. It cares about the abstract and quantitative and regards the qualitative as soft, unmeasurable, and thus trivial. As McGilchrist points out, it lives within a rigid template of reality, in its own mirror world, and anything that doesn't fit gets chopped off. 

And so technocratic projects are always naively, if not cynically, "data driven". Naive because technocrats don't understand the limitations of the impoverished interpretive framework they use to find meaning in the data, and they don't understand how irrational interests shape their supposedly rational methods. They are cynical when they know their interpretations of the data are arbitrary or manipulated to serve predetermined agendas. While they present themselves as "impatient optimists", they too often develop elaborate and fundamentally wrongheaded, if not delusional, strategies to change the world for the better by some limited metric of their own contrivance, and in doing so too often create even bigger messes than the one they hoped to clean up. 

It's a mentality that religious fundamentalists share with ideologues on the left and right because it's not the content of their thinking that matters so much as the quality of it. This is the mindset that supported, for idealistic reasons, the invasion of Iraq and is also the mindset that makes it impossible for those who have it to see that they were wrong until the evidence is overwhelming and incontrovertible. It's the mindset of economists who believe in things like perfectly competitive markets and have a hard time understanding why reality won't conform to their theories. Technocratic thinking starts with an abstraction, and then insists that the world conform to it, and if it won't do it willingly it will use force if it can.  

It's the driving force behind idealistic social engineering projects that so often lead to destructive, bloody ends. These impatient optimists, all with the best of intentions, in extreme cases gave us Vietnam, the Cultural Revolution in China, the Terror in France, and the Spanish Inquisition. It's the abstract, delusional thinking behind the idea that there can be a war on drugs or that all kids who live in poverty can succeed academically if we improve their teachers without changing their life conditions outside of the school building. It's the McDonald's mentality that wants to standardize everything so the hamburger you get in Dayton, Ohio, is the same one you get in Anchorage, Alaska. But our kids are not hamburgers or widgets or anything that should be treated in a standardized way. Don't be confused by the humanistic rhetoric of technocrats. Look at their policies. Obama talks like a humanist, but Duncan's policies are technocratic through and through. 

No, our culture no longer produces great souls--we produce instead celebrities, experts, and technocratic warlords like Bill Gates, Dick Cheney, and Michelle Rhee. They are in their own minds right, and everyone else wrong. They don't realize, however, that they are working with only half a brain, hypertrophied though that half might be. They have their arguments, and some of them are very clever if you accept their basic assumptions, but how do you talk to someone about an alternative vision with different assumptions that embraces the beauties of red and green and blue when they are colorblind and think that anybody who isn't is crazy?